Lead UX Designer, Design Systems & Tokens Architect

Vanguard; Malvern (Chester County); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Vanguard is seeking a Principal UX Designer to lead the Design Systems and Practices Team (DS+P) as part of the Advisor Experience System (AXS). This hands-on design leadership role shapes the technical direction, promotes scalable components, and elevates design quality across products and platforms.

You will mentor designers, partner with engineers, and drive documentation, accessibility, and semantic token strategies to ensure a cohesive, robust system that supports complex enterprise

Qualifications

• Significant UX and product design experience with enterprise design systems.
• Expert knowledge of reusable system design: components, tokens, patterns, and templates.
• Strong visual and interaction design craft, with typography and layout judgment.
• Experience designing complex components with accessibility and constraints.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical design and evolution of AXS components, patterns, tokens, templates, and foundations.
• Translate complex needs into reusable, accessible, scalable design solutions.
• Own complex component architecture including variants, states, and responsive behavior.
• Establish a high bar for interaction and systems design quality across the library.
• Collaborate with front-end engineers to align design and code and solve implementation questions.
• Create and maintain documentation and usage guidance for designers and developers.

Skills

Design systems

Design tokens

Component architecture

Accessibility

Documentation

Figma

Collaboration with engineers

Tools

Storybook

Figma libraries

Job description

Vanguard is seeking a Principal UX Designer to lead the Design Systems and Practices Team (DS+P) as part of the Advisor Experience System (AXS). This hands-on design leadership role shapes the technical direction, promotes scalable components, and elevates design quality across products and platforms.

You will mentor designers, partner with engineers, and drive documentation, accessibility, and semantic token strategies to ensure a cohesive, robust system that supports complex enterprise